You could protect a religious minority against gays and lesbians. Or you could protect gays and lesbians against a religious minority. And then, it seems to me something political is happening. Because we're not really looking at the kind of speech that is injurious.

I do not mean to say that such institutions act unilaterally on psychic life, or that they determine certain psychic outcomes. Rather, they exploit forms of fear and insecurity that are there for any population - no political organisation of life could ever fully do away with fear and insecurity; but some work to intensify, accelerate, and make more acute forms of fear, and to provide ideological focus for such intensified fears, at which point critical thinking has a fierce rival. The critical analysis that shows precisely how those forms of fear are promulgated, and for what purpose.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that all investigative journalism prior to 9/11 in the US was praiseworthy. But there were more examples to which one could point, and there were at last some activist photographers who understood that getting information into the public sphere in spite of military censorship was a right and obligation within democracy. That strain in war journalism did nearly vanish during that time.

The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection.

People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.

I think there is no one answer. It is still a struggle, there are tensions and I'm sure there are many people who would like to see these questions laid to rest or cease to be posed altogether.

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?